Avionics systems generally comprise their own anomaly detection and alert generation means able to transmit the alerts to a system for centralized management of alerts (or “Flight Warning System” as it is known). Thus such a system for managing alerts is capable of alerting the crew, of apprising of the defects of the aircraft and of listing for the crew the procedures to be applied as responses to the alerts displayed by the system. A centralized system for managing alerts constitutes progress with respect to sub-system based alert reports which would not allow the crew to have an overall picture in the case of several alerts arising concomitantly. Furthermore, the system for centralized management of alerts comprises the means for dispatching the detected and processed alerts to a system for recording the flight data as well as to a maintenance system of the aircraft and for synchronizing the audio messages associated with the alerts. Avionics systems also host their own mechanism for detecting functional anomalies whose result is thereafter transmitted directly to the alerts management function. More generally, a distinction is made between the “Monitoring” part, that is to say that for overseeing functional anomalies, which is hosted mainly in the avionics systems and partially in the alerts management function and the “Consolidation” function hosted in the system for managing the alerts which, with a monitoring result, according to the flight conditions, associates an alert.
The main functions of the system for centralized management of alerts are the collecting of the data of the avionics systems, the detecting of alerts, the filtering of alerts and the announcing of alerts. The main difficulty is the detecting of alerts which assumes a good knowledge of the state of the systems and which consists in detecting functional anomalies made by the system for centralized management of alerts and avionics systems monitoring functions.
Currently, the problem is solved by the avionics systems and the centralized management system and the technical solution to the problem is based on the processing of the input streams (collecting of the data of the avionics systems) via logic of Boolean type: AND, OR, NOR, NOT, delay, confirmation, step, etc. As represented by FIG. 1, the solutions used for the management of alerts comprises a system for centralized management of alerts (FWS) able to recover various items of information. This information provided to the FWS system may be simple data and alerts generated directly by the external systems. When the avionics systems host their own function for detecting functional anomalies, the alert associated with the anomaly is thereafter transmitted directly to the FWS system. The alerts are taken into account by a module for managing alerts and the FWS system can display to the crew the alerts as well as the associated procedures for resolving the problem related to the alert. When the information is simple data, the module for managing the alerts performs an interpretation of the data received so as to determine whether it is necessary to generate an alert. To this end, the alerts management module implements an alerts detection function.
Aircraft consisting, as they do, of complex systems, the FWS system must be capable of processing a multitude of alerts and information. The problem with the current solutions originates from the fact that the avionics systems and the centralized management function do not know the topology and the interactions between the avionics systems since the configurations of the systems are implicitly included in the logic for detecting the alerts. This logic may turn out to be erroneous notably within the framework of multiple faults or within the framework of systems reconfiguration. Furthermore, the cases of multiple faults can lead to multiple alerts which impact strongly on the burden of the flight personnel. Because the logic used is static and monofault, that is to say with a given fault is associated an alert, the associated algorithms lack robustness to aspects of automatic reconfiguration or of selective passivation or to multiple faults. The expression “selective passivation” is understood to mean the fact that a part of the network of items of equipment is no longer used.